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A Tale Of Two PM's & Other Poll Pointers

A
shoe and bangles are hurled at the Prime Minister while he is in Gujarat.The
reaction and the outcome in both cases are different.The first incident took
place in the run up to the 2009 lok Sabha elections and involved Dr Manmohan
Singh, then UPA Prime Minister.The second incident took place in Vadodara
on October 22 this year in the run up to the state Assembly polls and involved
Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

In
the incident involving Dr Singh,he had directed that no action be taken against
the youth and had even asked officers accompanying him to ensure that no
action was taken against him. The large heartedness of Dr.Singh
notwithstanding,,the youth who hurled the shoe at the UPA Prime Minister seems
to have been rewarded by the then BJP government. And last heard he works in
the private staff of a top elected BJP functionary holding a high
constitutional post.

In
the recent incident, the woman who had hurled bangles at the convoy of Prime
Minister Modi in Vadodara had been leading the agitation of anganwadi
workers who have been seeking pay parity.She was suspended from her government
job forthwith and the suspension order is dated October 22 ,the day she hurled
the bangles at the convoy. Interestingly the lady had in June ,2017 received
the best teacher award at the hands of Chief Minister Vijay Rupani and
education minister Bhupendrasinh Chudasama. Two people, two acts, different
outcome from the same state government. Interestingly, the present PM was the
then CM of Gujarat!

*
*
*
*

“Should
you be offering police protection to somebody whom you have charged with
sedition, all the same no, thank you’. It was in these words that Patidar
Anamat Andolan Samiti(PAAS) leader Hardik Patel spurned the Gujarat government
offer of police protection last week.

Polls
and politics make men and masters, even governments do strange things.
The Government of Gujarat first filed cases for conspiring to bring down a
lawfully elected government against agitating patidar leaders including
Patel,and went to the extent of getting him externed from the limits of
the state for six months. Come elections and it did an about turn, initiating a
process of withdrawing cases against the youth who were earlier put behind bars
in serious offences and now offering police protection to their leader Hardik
who ,however spurned their offer, stating that this was just to keep tabs on him.

Following
the large scale violence after the patidar community’s mega rally in Ahmedabad
on August 25,2015, the crime branch had arrested Hardik and three of his
colleagues and charged them under IPC sections 124A(sedition) and 120B(criminal
conspiracy).

· *
*
*
*

If claim is king and calculations based on it, carry through,
then the BJP need not raise a little finger to achieve the target it has set for
itself in the ensuing elections. See how.

A BJP leader put it across this way. There are 4.33 crore voters
in the state and even if 70 per cent of them turn up to vote then it comes to
3.03 crore voters. The party is on record having claimed it has a
registered worker base of 1.18 crore . An average of three members per family
of every worker voting for the party would safely take them past the target set
for this poll.

The BJP has gone to town stating that it will win 150 of the
total 82 Vidhan Sabha seats in Gujarat. The party’s national president,
Gujarat’s own Amit Shah has gone on record to state that even if it gets
one seat short of this figure, ie 149, there will be no victory celebrations in
the state by the party.

Whether it has been done to shore up the morale of
it’s foot soldiers or the BJP suffers big time from a Congress complex is not
clear. What is ,however clear is that while Narendra Modi as chief minister of
Gujarat, broke many records, one record proved elusive. The Highest number of
seats won by any party to come to power in the state stands in the name of
former chief minister Madhavsinh Solanki of the Congress who bagged 149 of the
total 182 seats in 1985. Logically, this seems to be the only reason why the
BJP would want to give this elusive gift to the one time Chief Minister who is
now the Prime Minister by bagging 150 seats. Modi already holds the record for
the longest serving Chief Minister of the state(4610 days) through three Vidhan
Sabha elections and one his own since he was not a legislator when appointed to
the post .So…..

*
*
*
*

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is never known to have missed
casting his vote.He is a registered voter in Ahmedabad and will
surely turn up at the polling booth in Ranip locality to cast his
vote in the ensuing elections. But do you know that if all the voters
registered under this name turn up to vote in Gujarat ,there will be 147
Narendra Modis casting their vote. Ahmedabad district itself has 49
people by this name registered as voter and it includes Prime Minister
Modi.This is followed by Mehsana district with 24 voters of this name and
thereafter comes Bharuch district with 16 such named voters, Surat district
with 15 voters, Patan district 13, Banskantha 11 voters, Sabarkantha district 7
with Gandhinagar and Vadodara district accounting for 6 each of the same
name.

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R.K. Misra is a field journalist with over forty years of experience working for some of the top news publications in India and abroad. Presently the Roving editor of The Free Press Journal of Mumbai, he is also the State Correspondent of the New York based international news agency, Associated Press (AP), news dailies Hitavada of Nagpur, Daily Post of Chandigarh and Outlook magazine of Delhi , to name a few. Beginning his professional career with The Times of India in Ahmedabad, he has worked as Senior Assistant Editor with Probe India and it’s sister hindi publication ‘Maya’ in Delhi and as Special Correspondent and later Roving Editor of The Pioneer and the Indo-Asian News Service (IANS). Specialising in cross-country coverage of conflict areas like Punjab and Kashmir at the height of militancy , he has also done stints for the Gulf News of Dubai and the Arab News of Saudi Arabia besides the Tribune of Chandigarh, and Vijay Times of Bangalore. His specialization, however remains, Gujarat. He is presently based in Gandhinagar, the state capital of Gujarat.